webchat

Webchat allows people to talk to customer support advisers through their browser. This can be more convenient than picking up the phone. It also helps keep people within a digital transaction when they may otherwise drop out, particularly if they don’t understand something or hit a problem. The webchat alpha explores how best to design and test a set of service and interaction patterns to help departments evaluate, procure and implement webchat systems more quickly.

As more and more services begin to adopt our Government as a Platform components, we’ve decided to post regular updates on our progress building them. This is a list of what we’ve done so far in 2017. We’ll iterate the format of these updates to make them as useful as we can.

GDS started looking at how to support services implementing webchat last year. Since then we’ve completed an alpha and published 8 posts on 4 GDS blogs about our findings, insight and recommendations. Here’s a useful roundup of all the webchat blog posts.

We ran a short discovery looking at how government uses web chat to help support users. We wanted to know if there are common web chat needs across government and what opportunities there might be to meet these needs in a more consistent way. Chris Heathcote explains.

About Government as a Platform

This blog is about our work with departments and agencies to build common components that can be shared and reused to make it easy for service teams across government to design, assemble and build services.